Ramblings about cycling, politics, and life.

Climate change caused this post

I don’t have any skin in the climate change debate. Being someone who cares about reason and holding informed opinions, I have no problem admitting that I possess neither adequate information nor the scientific knowledge to form an opinion on climate change that’s even slightly intelligent. I wish more people took this approach on a broad range of topics, but I wish for a lot of things that’ll never happen.

My lack of opinion doesn’t preclude me from stating observations about the climate change debate, rather than climate change itself. In fact, it might even make me one of the better people to do it because I’m essentially an objective third-party. So here is what I’ve observed.

Like I said, I have no skin in this game, so I’m saying this as an impartial observer (so don’t leave comments calling me a climate change denier)… get real. We’ve had natural disasters since the dawn of time. The American West has a wild-fire season EVERY year and has had one for as long as trees have existed on the continent. The Gulf area and East Coast have a hurricane season EVERY YEAR, and they’ve had far worse ones in the past. Tornado Ally is called Tornado Ally for a reason. These disasters are routine and predictable. I understand the desire to bring attention to climate change, but you do your movement no service by blindly blaming “climate change!!!” for every scary event from mass shootings to Hillary rallies. No one is buying it. You claim to be all about scientific process and facts, but keep throwing out this accusation with absolutely no corroborating evidence. Get your shit together or you’ll continue to sound as dumb and ill-informed as the deniers you hate so much.

Also, just to head off the inevitable retorts to this post which will go something like, “yea but they’re blaming it on climate change because XYZ event/season/happening is the ‘worst on record,'” I’m not any more impressed by that “evidence”. “Worst on record” in 100-200 years of records out of tens of billions of years of history is a sample size smaller than Trump’s hands and hardly powerful enough to matter statistically.